Jake Zwart
Senior Research Data Scientist
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJake Zwart is a Senior Research Data Scientist with 12 years of experience blending aquatic ecology, physics-based modeling, and advanced machine learning to produce operational environmental forecasts and decision-ready science. He has led cross-agency projects at USGS, authored over 65 scientific products, and earned national recognition including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Jake develops physics-informed deep learning—custom loss functions, PDE integration, and pretraining on process-model outputs—to improve generalization and fairness in environmental predictions, and his stream-temperature forecasting work directly informs reservoir management. He has held scientific leadership roles including Acting Data Science Branch Chief, helped hire and grow data science teams, and co-organizes a recurring virtual conference on data and open science in aquatic research. Based in San Francisco, he combines hands-on coding (99% of work hosted on GitLab) with strategy and mentorship, and actively shapes the ecological forecasting community through steering committees and inclusive workplace advocacy.
12 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Biology, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Biology at University of Notre DameBachelor of Science (BS), Biology/Biological Sciences, General, Bachelor of Science (BS), Biology/Biological Sciences, General at Calvin College
Github Skills (87)
ord9
water9
noaa9
prediction-model9
forecast9
weather-api9
weather9
modeling9
weather-data9
openweathermap9
formatting9
temperature8
hydrology8
ecology8
climate-change8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
jzwart/mendota_ice
Dec 2018 - Apr 2022
Ice duration viz for dataisbeuatiful https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/a2p5f0/battle_dataviz_battle_for_the_month_of_december/?st=JP8OMOKZ&sh=42466127
Contributions:1 PR, 7 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 5 months
nanoidbattledataisbeautifulmonthbarrage
jzwart/protoloads
May 2018 - Dec 2018
Prototyping and exploring options for broad-scale load forecasting
Contributions:1 PR, 74 pushes, 4 branches in 7 months
forecastingprototypingmachine-learningscaleoptions
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